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lovingkindness, the dignity of 
the individual and the sanctity 
of life.
This same principle, 
that Genesis 1 is a polemic, 
part of an argument with a 
background, is essential to 
understanding the idea that 
God created humanity “in His 
image, after His likeness.” This 
language would not have been 
unfamiliar to the first readers of 
the Torah. It was one they knew 
well. It was commonplace in the 
first civilizations, Mesopotamia 
and ancient Egypt, where certain 
people were said to be in the 
image of God. They were the 
kings of the Mesopotamian city-
states and the pharaohs of Egypt. 
Nothing could have been more 
radical than to say that not just 
kings and rulers appear in God’s 
image. We all do. Even today the 
idea is daring: how much more 
so in an age of absolute rulers 
with absolute power.
Understood thus, Genesis 
1:26-27 is not so much a 
metaphysical statement about 
the nature of the human 
person as it is a political 
protest against the very basis 
of hierarchical, class- or caste-
based societies whether in 
ancient or modern times. That 
is what makes it the most 
incendiary idea in the Torah. 
In some fundamental sense, 
we are all equal in dignity and 
ultimate worth, for we are all in 
God’s image, regardless of color, 
culture or creed.
A similar idea appears later 
in the Torah, in relation to 
the Jewish people, when God 
invited them to become a 
kingdom of priests and a holy 
nation (Ex. 19:6). All nations in 
the ancient world had priests, 
but none was “a kingdom of 
priests.
” All religions have holy 
individuals — but none claim 
that every one of their members 
is holy. This, too, took time to 
materialize. 
During the entire biblical 
era there were hierarchies. 

There were priests and high 
priests, a holy elite. But after 
the destruction of the Second 
Temple, every prayer became a 
sacrifice, every leader of prayer 
a priest, and every synagogue 
a fragment of the Temple. A 
profound egalitarianism is at 
work just below the surface of 
the Torah, and the rabbis knew 
it and lived it.

A LIMITED DOMINION
A second idea is contained in 
the phrase, “so that they may 
rule over the fish in the sea and 
the birds in the sky.
” Note that 
there is no suggestion that any-
one has the right to have domin-
ion over any other human being. 
 In Paradise Lost, Milton, like 
the Midrash, states that this was 
the sin of Nimrod, the first great 
ruler of Assyria and by implica-
tion the builder of the Tower of 
Babel (see Gen. 10:8-11). Milton 
writes that when Adam was told 
that Nimrod would “arrogate 
dominion undeserved,
” he was 
horrified: 
O execrable son so to aspire
Above his Brethren, to himself 
assuming
Authority usurped, from God 
not given:
He gave us only over beast, 
fish, fowl
Dominion absolute; that right 
we hold
By his donation; but man over 
men
He made not lord; such title to 
himself
Reserving, human left from 
human free.
Paradise Lost, Book 12:64-71
To question the right of 
humans to rule over other 
humans without their consent 
was at that time utterly unthink-
able. All advanced societies were 
like this. How could they be 
otherwise? Was this not the very 
structure of the universe? Did 
the sun not rule the day? Did 
the moon not rule the night? 
Was there not a hierarchy of the 
gods in heaven itself? 

Already implicit here is the 
deep ambivalence the Torah 
would ultimately show toward 
the very institution of kingship, 
the rule of “man over men.
”

THE POWER TO BE FREE
The third implication lies in 
the sheer paradox of God 
saying, “Let us make man in 
our image, after our likeness.
” 
We sometimes forget, when 
reading these words, that in 
Judaism God has no image or 
likeness. To make an image of 
God is to transgress the second 
of the Ten Commandments 
and to be guilty of idolatry. 
Moses emphasized that at the 
Revelation at Sinai, “You saw 
no likeness, you only heard the 
sound of words.
” (Deut. 4:12)
God has no image because He 
is not physical. He transcends 
the physical universe because He 
created it. Therefore, He is free, 
unconstrained by the laws of 
matter. That is what God means 
when He tells Moses that His 
name is “I will be what I will 
be” (Ex. 3:14), and later when, 
after the sin of the Golden Calf, 
He tells him, “I will have mercy 
on whom I will have mercy.
” 
God is free, and by making us in 
His image, He gave us also the 
power to be free.
This, as the Torah makes 
clear, was God’s most fateful 
gift. Given freedom, humans 
misuse it. Adam and Eve 
disobey God’s command. Cain 
murders Abel. By the end of the 
parshah we find ourselves in 
the world about to be destroyed 
by the Flood, for it is filled with 
violence to the point where God 
regretted He had ever created 
humanity. 
This is the central drama 
of Tanach and of Judaism as a 
whole. Will we use our freedom 
to respect order or misuse it to 
create chaos? Will we honor or 
dishonor the image of God that 
lives within the human heart 
and mind?
These are not only ancient 

questions. They are as alive 
today as ever they were in the 
past. The question raised by 
serious thinkers — ever since 
Nietzsche argued in favor of 
abandoning both God and 
the Judeo-Christian ethic — is 
whether justice, human rights 
and the unconditional dignity of 
the human person are capable 
of surviving on secular grounds 
alone? Nietzsche himself 
thought not.
In 2008, Yale philosopher 
Nicholas Woltersdorff published 
a magisterial work arguing that 
our Western concept of justice 
rests on the belief that “all of 
us have great and equal worth: 
the worth of being made in the 
image of God and of being loved 
redemptively by God.
”
There is, he insists, no secular 
rationale on which a similar 
framework of justice can be 
built. That is surely what John F. 
Kennedy meant in his inaugural 
address when he spoke of the 
“revolutionary beliefs for which 
our forebears fought,
” that “the 
rights of man come not from the 
generosity of the state, but from 
the hand of God.
”
Momentous ideas made the 
West what it is, ideas like human 
rights, the abolition of slavery, 
the equal worth of all, and 
justice based on the principle 
that right is sovereign over 
might. All of these ultimately 
derived from the statement in 
the first chapter of the Torah 
that we are made in God’s image 
and likeness. 
No other text has had a 
greater influence on moral 
thought, nor has any other 
civilization ever held a higher 
vision of what we are called on 
to be. 

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-

2020) was a global religious leader, 

philosopher, the author of more 

than 25 books and moral voice 
for our time. His series of essays 
on the weekly Torah portion, 
entitled “Covenant & Conversation” 
will continue to be shared and 

distributed around the world.

